Month: February 2014

• February 12, 2014

  Mythos, logos, and modernity

  It is said that philosophy is born just when, for instance, the Homeric myths give way to the cosmological views espoused by the Presocratics. So John Burnet: ‘With Thales and his successors [i.e., the Presocratics] a new thing came into the world.’ This new thing was logos. Rational explanations–such as Thales’ that life is water…
• February 11, 2014

  Rewriting Wittgenstein’s opening ‘Remarks’

  I have returned time and again to Wittgenstein’s opening statements on method from ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough‘: One must start out in error and convert it into truth. That is, one must reveal the source of error, otherwise hearing the truth won’t do any good. The truth cannot force its way in when something else…
• February 10, 2014

  Proper appreciation for human embodiment

  Not to be pulled apart by the urgings of the body yet not to swear off the corporeal pleasures unique to human experience. Neither to give into one’s appetitive cravings nor to practice world-denying asceticism. Neither vanity nor shame. Neither the wrong Yes nor the wrong No. How then? Listen: the warmth of the sun…
• February 9, 2014

  A secular version of the Parable of the Talents

  Our time on earth is finite; we know that we shall perish. How are we to best spend our days? How to use our gifts? On the one hand, we could believe that all our words and deeds do not amount to much since these will be erased with the passing of time. Hence, we…
• February 8, 2014

  Plotinus on sculpting the self

  In Enneads I 6, 9, Plotinus writes, Go back inside yourself and look: if you do not yet see yourself as beautiful [i.e., as participating in the Idea of Beauty], then do as the sculptor does with a statue he wants to make beautiful; he chisels away one part, and levels off another, makes one…